Winter Work Page 6

  “Whose car is that?” she asked. The smoked windows made it hard to see in, although she turned in her seat as they passed. “A Volvo. Must be someone important.”

  “Krauss. He must have guessed I’d be coming here next.”

  “The Stasi man you and the lieutenant were talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will he make trouble for you?”

  “The better question is whether he was making trouble for Lothar.”

  “Oh.” Her voice sounded small. “I see.”

  Emil rolled to a stop just downhill as they pulled alongside Karola’s house.

  “I probably shouldn’t walk you to your door. The less important he thinks you are to me, the better.”

  “Yes. I can see that. Although it’s all right with me if you tell him about us. Unless of course he’s one of those ministry prudes who still thinks like an old schoolmarm, like that bastard Mielke.”

  “That bastard Mielke is now locked up in solitary confinement, so you can stop worrying about him, at least.”

  She climbed out, then turned and spoke before shutting the door.

  “Be careful, Emil. There are two of us counting on you.”

  “I’ll come by for you in the morning. Early. Six-thirty.”

  She nodded and turned up the walkway, glancing uphill toward the Volvo before reaching her door. Emil waited until she was inside before getting out of his car. He walked briskly, making a beeline toward the Volvo before Krauss could react.

  It was time to test the new dynamics of power. Time for a confrontation that would get a few things out in the open. Time also to put a little fear into Dieter Krauss, because the man had certainly earned it.

  Emil opened the Volvo’s passenger door and climbed in.

  7

  The move was so sudden and unexpected that Krauss didn’t have time to turn off his radio, which was blaring an American rock tune from a station in West Berlin. Emil glanced at the dial like it was something subversive, and Krauss switched it off. There was a moment of awkward silence before Emil spoke.

  “Well?”

  “I wanted a word with you, someplace where we wouldn’t be interrupted by that officious ass Dorn.”

  “He speaks well of you, too, Krauss. Make it quick, my wife shouldn’t be alone for long.”

  “What was Lothar up to? What’s been keeping him so busy?”

  Emil made a show of checking his watch.

  “Less than three hours since our colleague was killed. A little early to begin reassessing his career, even for you.”

  “Don’t be a moralist. This is an investigation.”

  “Not yours, apparently. And if Lothar was ‘busy,’ as you put it, then that’s news to me.”

  “You two were close. You must have noticed something.”

  “Not nearly as close as we used to be. I saw him far more at the office than I ever saw him up here.”

  “But you must have heard the whispers.”

  “And how would I do that up here? The only whispers in my dacha come from the wind in the trees, the swallows in the chimney.”

  “Well, in Berlin there was plenty to hear. All sorts of chatter about him scurrying back and forth among the wrong sorts of people. Out to that storage bunker near Leipzig. Or over to Marzahn, to see that fellow who’s running the task force in Sub-Department 7.”

  “Plotz?”

  “Andreas Plotz, yes. And whenever anyone like me got too curious he’d run back up here to hide in the woods.”

  This was disturbing news indeed. Surprising, too. Lothar had always been one of the most careful people he’d known, and an inveterate planner. Everything by the book, nothing done in a rush or on the spur of the moment—not if he could help it. If anything, he’d been meticulous to a fault. Had he really become this sloppy without Emil noticing? Or maybe other people were the ones who’d become careless—Andreas Plotz, for starters—which would be just as disturbing.

  “All of us have too many secrets, Krauss. It’s what we were paid for. Maybe you’d like to tell me yours.”

  “You HVA people.” Krauss shook his head. “All of you always pretended to be above the fray, cleaner than the rest of us because your work was abroad. It’s like that pose of yours in choosing that stupid car. A piece-of-shit Wartburg, when you could have had a Peugeot. Or even a Volvo, like mine.”

  “Maybe I was never comfortable with the idea of advertising my status every time I went for a drive.”

  “Yes, because you’re such a man of the people. Like Wolf, with his driver and his nice duplex in Berlin, and his fat pension. Yet look at what happened to all of you at the first sign of trouble. Wolf runs to Moscow like a crying boy to his nanny. You and Lothar go to ground in your dachas, leaving the rest of us to defend what little of the ministry remains.”

  “The ministry’s gone, Krauss. You’re fighting for a ghost.”

  “No, I’m fighting for our legacy. Our future. With the right use of what’s left, we might even have one. But not if everyone gives up, or destroys the remnants. And he was helping them. Or that was the word.”

  “Lothar? Helping who?”

  “All those asses like Plotz, working their shredders nonstop, then tearing up the paper by hand when the machines broke down, or burning big piles of it in trash bins. Some of that is still worthy information, Grimm. Some of it is still worth protecting.”

  “And some of it has been protected. I have heard that much. Even Andreas Plotz would tell you that. He’s an archivist, one of our best. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I asked one of his people. He told me to fuck off, then threatened to report me to that new interior minister, Diestel, the one who wants us all to disappear.”

  “Another good reason not to get involved.”

  “Is that what you and Lothar decided, huddled around your woodstoves at night? What else were the two of you talking about?”

  “It’s not like you think. We came up here to keep to ourselves, each to his own. Even before November, Lothar and I were drifting apart. It started a few years ago, after…well, you remember.”

  Krauss nodded, as if finally conceding a point. The affair, Emil meant, an indiscretion that had reverberated in the corridors of Normanenstrasse. Lothar Fischer had been the HVA’s brightest rising star at the time. He was even mentioned as a possible successor to Stasi chief Erich Mielke. Then he threw away his marriage in pursuit of an actress thirty years his junior.

  Initially he had planned out this affair with as much care and energy as if it were a matter of state security. But as matters progressed, and then deteriorated, he had acted more like a blundering stalker, and he had done so openly, sometimes drunkenly. It was Lothar’s lone bout of recklessness—until now, anyway—and it had cost him dearly.

  It hadn’t helped that their big boss, Mielke, was quite old-fashioned about such things. Like a schoolmarm, as Karola had put it only moments before. For all that, Lothar might have weathered the episode without sanction if it hadn’t damaged the one aspect of his reputation he was most valued for—his rigid insistence on playing everything as carefully as possible.

  Mielke had confronted Lothar with a dossier of the most lurid evidence—some of it probably gathered by Krauss. Lothar had avoided demotion, but his professional ascent ended, and his wife, Käthe, left him. He went into seclusion for a while, brooding and resentful. For a year or so, he had seemed drunk almost every time Emil saw him on weekends. At the office he had looked haggard and expendable.

  “Okay, so you two were no longer close. But you have eyes and ears. You couldn’t have missed everything.”

  “Not in normal times. But now? And with my wife needing extra care? This hasn’t been an easy time for any of us, Krauss, you should know that as well as anyone. But how about this—how about I ask around for you? Prod a few old source
s—Andreas Plotz, some others. Knock on a few doors. Maybe, between the two of us, we can find out what Lothar was up to.”

  Krauss narrowed his eyes as if trying to figure out an ulterior motive. Then he sighed and nodded appreciatively.

  “Yes. That would be helpful. Contacts, that’s mostly what I’m looking for. People he’s been in touch with in recent weeks. On both sides of the Wall.”

  “The Wall’s gone, Krauss. Or will be soon enough.”

  “Physically, yes. But it still exists in our minds, and in theirs. Our enemies are still our enemies.”

  “Even if the fight is over?”

  “For you, maybe.”

  “Fine. How will I reach you with any results? Surely you don’t still have access to your office?”

  “My office!” Krauss said, freshly outraged. “Do you know that I was barely able to recover my own personal possessions before they shut it for good?”

  “You’re lucky. Last time I went I had to bribe a guard to let me in the main door, and when I got upstairs there were six people from the Citizens Committee, going from desk to desk.”

  “The Citizens Committee! A bullshit name for a bunch of fucking anarchists. We should have locked them up years ago as enemies of the state.”

  “With a few of them I believe we did. But do you know what they were doing up in our office?”

  “Stealing state property, no doubt. And state secrets as well.”

  “No. They were watering the plants and flowers.”

  “What?”

  “Apparently it occurred to one of them that all of us must have rushed home without rescuing our office plants, so there they were with watering cans, sprinkling every plant. It was kind of sweet, and I told them so. As a peace offering, they let me take home the African violet Bettina gave me years ago.”

  Emil told the story mostly because he figured it would enrage Krauss. He was right.

  “Peace offering! There’s no making peace with that crowd. It’s outrageous the way they treat us. Have you heard what they’ve done to Mielke? Solitary confinement, it’s intolerable.”

  “You sound as if you actually feel sorry for him.”

  “It’s the symbolism I detest. If they can do that to Mielke, what does that say for the rest of us?”

  “What we think doesn’t matter anymore, Krauss. But you still haven’t told me how to reach you.”

  “Ah, yes.” Krauss smiled. “A few of us from the Spezialkommission have set up our own new digs. Off site, of course, but rent free for the moment. We do still have friends out there, Emil, our secret patrons, and this place is not far from your old apartment.”

  He offered a street address, which Emil committed to memory.

  “I wouldn’t mind meeting some of these ‘secret patrons’ you speak of, especially once the paychecks stop.”

  Krauss winced, as if he wished he hadn’t made that little boast. Then he moved on.

  “It’s quite convenient, our new base of operations, and there is a wonderful little sausage stand right next door with the best currywurst in the district. That’s one thing that has improved since November, I’ll give them that. You don’t have to go to one of the party’s special stores to get something decent to eat. But we’re not accepting the new order without a fight, Emil. You should fight back, too.”

  “That’s not so easy for someone like me, as you saw this morning. Now even the Volkspolizei feel that they can push us around.”

  “That goddamned Dorn. What did he want from you?”

  “About what you’d expect. My whereabouts and movements. Anything that I might have known about Lothar’s recent doings.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “Exactly what I just told you. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Krauss seemed taken aback by the idea that a mere cop could extract as much information as he could. Another slap in the face by the new order. Emil spoke again before Krauss could register his disapproval.

  “Actually, he seemed more interested in learning everything I knew about you.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  Emil opened the car door and swung his feet onto the ground. He stood, turned, and leaned in to deliver his parting answer.

  “You should properly direct that question to Lieutenant Dorn.”

  Emil slammed the door as Krauss’s mouth fell open in surprise. Then he offered a jaunty wave through the smoked window and set out for his car, slapping the Volvo’s hood in passing.

  8

  Karola, watching from her kitchen window, exhaled in relief. From the moment Emil had climbed into the Volvo she had worried that the car would take him away forever, and that no one would ever find his body.

  But there he was now, safe for the moment, with a forced smile and a stilted jolliness, like a man trying to convince himself that he had gained the upper hand. Karola wasn’t so sure. She worried about Emil’s growing tendency toward recklessness now that he was at loose ends. She also knew that he had been in touch with Lothar Fischer far more often than he had admitted to Lieutenant Dorn, which made her wonder what else he was hiding, and why.

  In the past few days she had heard him talking on the phone to Lothar several times. The first time he’d left the house afterward, setting out on foot in the direction of the man’s dacha. He was gone more than an hour, and he’d seemed preoccupied afterward. The second time he’d returned well after dark, tracking mud and twigs into the house without pausing to put on his house slippers, which wasn’t like him at all. She surmised that the two men must have gone off into the woods. Or maybe Emil had taken the long way home. Then she overheard a third conversation, and arrived at a different conclusion.

  The irony was that, until recently, Emil had always been a little too careful, too much of a planner. Loosen up, she had always chided him. Stop fretting over every detail. The moment the ministry shut down, she began encouraging him to remake himself, to relax his routines.

  Now, here he was, finally making it up as he went along, Mr. Spontaneous, and her first impulse was to rein him in.

  If these changes had occurred while Bettina was still able to speak—say, a year ago—then the two women would have shared a good laugh as they discussed him in private. Emil had been one of their favorite topics of conversation whenever Karola pushed Bettina’s wheelchair around the lake. They were as much like sisters as friends in the way they shared secrets, a closeness that had come to their relationship almost the moment they’d met. It was one reason why she had helped take care of Bettina not only at the dacha, but also when Bettina and Emil had been living in Berlin, even though she had to drive half an hour to reach their apartment. And, yes, it was also the reason she and Bettina had decided so readily on their current, well, arrangement, for lack of a better word.

  The whole thing had been Bettina’s idea, a parting gift to her husband as she slipped into the final stage of muscular failure, with its inevitable retreat into the silent world of her thoughts.

  “I know he finds you attractive,” Bettina had said, speaking slowly by then. “He almost always averts his eyes when you come into the room, like he doesn’t want me to know it.”

  “You’re imagining things.”

  “I’m not. Nor am I imagining it when I see you do the same thing.”

  For a moment, Karola had been too embarrassed to answer.

  “Okay, maybe so. But none of that matters, because he clearly still loves you.”

  “I know that. This isn’t about love, Karola. It’s about loneliness, for both of you. It’s about the feel of a warm body next to you in bed. And in another few months, when I can no longer even move my little finger, or open my mouth to speak, he won’t even have that. I won’t, either. And you won’t. Unless…”

  “Stop, Bettina.”

  “Why? Do you find him unattractive? Am I
wrong about that?”

  “Well, no. You’re not.”

  “Is there someone else, then?”

  “No, no. There has been no one since Jürgen. I would have told you. But Emil? He’s yours.”

  “Do you think there is nothing selfish in this for me? If he’s happy, he’ll take better care of me. So will you. If he’s happy, he won’t feel like he’s such a prisoner of what has happened to me. And what better person for him to be happy with than someone I know and trust and love? Someone who I will still see almost every day.”

  Karola needed a bit more convincing, but within a few days they were in agreement, and began to discuss how to bring it about. They sometimes laughed over the way their plans aligned so easily with the political lessons the state had taught them. It was almost like arranging a teen event for the Young Pioneers, based on the teachings of Karl Marx—From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Only the silly uniforms were missing, the perky little songs, as they cooked up their experiment in collective love and affection. And it was love, Karola decided, even if not the kind that made you swoon when you were younger.

  She continued to sense Bettina’s approval of the arrangement in her eyes. During the past few months the two women had kept communicating in a way that even Emil hadn’t mastered, and perhaps never would. Where he saw blinks and a narrow range of emotions, Karola believed she could detect entire thoughts and sentences. They shared a wavelength, and the signal remained strong. And on the subject of Emil, Karola had become Bettina’s eyes and ears, even as Bettina, in her own way, continued to offer knowledge about Emil from the earlier years before Karola had known them. Thus had Karola built up an emotional dossier on this man in their lives—his worries, his hang-ups, and, now, the vulnerability of his deeper secrets.

  She backed away from the kitchen window as Emil walked to his Wartburg. Now that the two men were no longer focused on each other, she didn’t want them to see her watching.